Suchit Subhas, Director of Amazon’s B2B marketplace Amazon Business, said that the company’s customer base has now grown to over 6.5 lakh sellers from 14,000 sellers in 2017.
Responding to a recent report by BofA Global Research which said Amazon Business has limited scale in India as compared to market leaders Udaan and JioMart, Subhas told BusinessLine, “I don’t think we are limited in our scale. Actually, we are very happy with how the adoption has been in India and how we are driving some of these innovations.”
For Amazon, Amazon Business in India is said to be the company’s second largest B2B marketplace after the US. In the past five years, it has seen a 35 per cent increase in monthly active users, resulting in an 87 per cent increase in orders and a 111 per cent increase in sales. The company did not comment on the absolute number of monthly active users, orders, or sales.
Tier-2 and tier-3 cities are also said to have played a significant role in Amazon Business’ growth, with 30 per cent of buying customers and 25 per cent of orders coming from smaller cities.
Expansion plans
Speaking about the company’s plan to expand its market share in India, Subhas said, “We are happy with the adoption that we are seeing. We do see increased adoption in the smaller cities as well because of our extensive fulfilment coverage, among other things. We are also able to give very good service to even a small customer in a small city. So our aim will be to drive more awareness of the solution that we have. And we are confident that that will result in customers adopting us further.”
Ahead of the festive season, Amazon Business has also announced Small Business Week, which is an event running for small business customers across India from September 12th and 18th, 2022. This event will feature offers across IT products, Office supplies & furnishing, maintenance, repair and operations products, safety equipment, amongst others.